As the solo art song tradition evolved, a parallel choral tradition also developed, following the example set by the Fisk Jubilee Singers in their 1870s tours. While the solo art song tradition is characterized by the use of (sometimes elaborate) piano accompaniments, singing in the choral spiritual tradition has traditionally been largely a capella. Piano accompaniments, when they are written, are frequently designated for rehearsal use only.
Not long after the Fisk Jubilee Singers embarked on their first national tour in 1871, several rival groups appeared, some of which were community groups and others of which were Black college groups in the mold of the college singers from Fisk. One of the first rival college groups, organized in 1873, was the Hampton Singers, from Hampton Institute (now Hampton University), in Hampton, Virginia. Beginning in 1913, the Hampton Singers were led by the noted composer and conductor R. Nathaniel Dett6, who directed the choir for 23 years and earned an international reputation for both his arrangements of spirituals (as well as original compositions based on spirituals), and his extraordinary conducting skills. In addition, he composed a number of original works for piano, for solo voice, and for chorus. One of Dett’s choral works based on spirituals, “Listen to the Lambs,” is particularly well known for the consistently powerful emotional impact it has on diverse audiences.
At Howard University in Washington, D.C., students initially rebelled against the singing of spirituals, feeling that it was inconsistent with the goal of obtaining a sophisticated education that transcended the sorrows and humiliations of an enslaved past. Eventually, however, conductor and composer Warner Lawson, who had been trained at Fisk, took leadership of a choir at Howard that earned an international reputation for its performances of spirituals.
One of the most noteworthy college choirs emerged at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama. Like Hampton University, Tuskegee also engaged a choral director – William Levi Dawson7 -- who established an international reputation as an arranger and conductor of choral spirituals during his 25 years (1931-1956) at Tuskegee. Many of Dawson’s choral arrangements of spirituals, including “Ain-a That Good News,” “King Jesus is a-Listening,” “I’ve Been Buked,” are perennial favorites of choirs around the world. One of Dawson’s most ambitious works, his Negro Folk Symphony, was inspired by the legacy of spirituals (he preferred the term “Negro folk songs”) that Dawson had lived with all his life. The work was premiered by conductor Leopold Stokowski with the Philadelphia Symphony in 1934.
Over the years, many community choral groups, church choirs and professional ensembles have followed the examples of the early choral groups at premiere historically Black colleges and universities like Fisk, Hampton, Howard and Tuskegee, and many important composers have sustained the tradition of writing arrangements of spirituals for choral performance. One of the earliest and most important arrangers of choral spirituals working primarily outside the college setting was Hall Johnson8. One of Johnson’s important gifts, beyond the large number of highly popular arrangements of spirituals he created for soloists as well as for choral groups, was his ability to organize and train singing ensembles for performance in community, stage, radio and film settings. First organized in 1925, the Hall Johnson Choir, comprised of various groups of singers over the years, made its first notable appearance as the choir that sang all of the spirituals that Johnson arranged for the Pulitzer Prize winning musical play The Green Pastures, which debuted on Broadway in 1930. This was just beginning of national fame for a group that would perform in multiple venues in the U.S. and Europe, and provide music for several films.
Perhaps the most well known professional group to sing spirituals was the ensemble known as Wings Over Jordan, which began performing in the 1930s and was featured on popular, regularly scheduled radio programs heard by thousands of listeners across the United States.
The choral spiritual tradition continues in the performances of choral ensembles at historically Black colleges and universities and in the work of numerous community and professional groups that have sprung up over years. The extensive list of conductor-arrangers that have helped to sustain and revitalize this tradition includes such notables as Jester Hairston, Brazeal Dennard, Roland Carter, Wendell Whalum, and Moses Hogan, whose extraordinary productivity as a conductor and arranger helped sparked a new renaissance of interest in choral spirituals before his untimely death in 2003 at the age of 45.
In 1934, the African American anthropologist/folklorist Zora Neale Hurston raised a provocative challenge concerning the flourishing art song and choral spiritual traditions:
There never has been a presentation of genuine Negro spirituals to any audience anywhere. What is being sung by the concert artists and glee clubs are the works of Negro composers or adaptors based on spirituals. Under this head come the works of Harry T. Burleigh, Rosamond Johnson, Lawrence Brown, Nathaniel Dett, Hall Johnson and Work. All good work and beautiful, but not the spirituals. These neo-spirituals are the outgrowth of glee clubs. Fisk University boasts perhaps the oldest and certainly the most famous of these. They have spread their interpretation over America and Europe. . . . But with the glee clubs and soloists, there has not been one genuine spiritual presented.9
Hurston’s challenge, repeated in various academic and community settings over the years, raises the question of what it means for a spiritual to be “genuine.” For Hurston, it was clear that the art song and choral spiritual traditions, which she termed “neo-spirituals,” were caricatured and inferior imitations of genuine African American music forms. In support of her position, there is no question that the performance practices surrounding European-influenced arranged spirituals were dramatically different from those practiced when spirituals served as community oriented folk songs. The singer/activist scholar Bernice Johnson Reagon has frequently emphasized the distinction in her public comments. For example, in an interview with the Veterans of Hope Project at the Iliff School of Theology, Reagon had this to say about her own approach to singing, which is closely aligned with what Hurston would consider a “genuine” African American performance practice:
“I’m basically a 19th century singer, which means that I’m not a soloist . . Singing does not make sense to me without the congregation. The singing exists to form the community. . . . In Western formal choral tradition, there’s an aim for a blend so you cannot distinguish where the parts are coming from. With congregational singing, I could drive up to the church and they could be singing and I could tell you who was there, because the individual timbres of a voice never disappear.10
Reagon’s congregational approach to African American sacred song has been embraced by her own professional group Sweet Honey in the Rock as well as other performance ensembles who have attempted to be truer to the folk origins of the spirituals, such as Linda Tillery’s Oakland, California based Cultural Heritage Choir.
On the other hand, one can raise the question of whether the spirituals would have the world-wide attention and influence that they have today were it not for the art song and choral traditions, which have carried the sounds of the spirituals around the world. These traditions have also provided a level of legitimacy for African American folk music within the classical music world. And in fact some analysts, like the literary scholar John Lovell, Jr., argues that there is no such thing as a genuine spiritual, since all music evolves over time:
There is no such thing as adulterating a spiritual. There is no super-standard to begin with; there are only people creating and singing what’s in their hearts. . . . If people were forced to sing the songs the way some arbitrary authority decides or not sing them at all, the spiritual would quickly die. And would be better dead.11
What do you think? Record your thoughts here and then click to see what others have said.
After you record your thoughts, read the discussion found in the Spirituals as Folksong / Spirituals as Art Song and in Choral Arrangements in the Evolving Contexts section of the current website and compare your ideas with those outlined there.
Hansonia Caldwell, African American Music: Spirituals (third edition), pp. 51-55 & 81-91. The book was published in 2003 by Ikoro Communications, Inc. in Culver City, California, and is available directly from the publisher:
Ikoro Communications, Inc.
P.O. Box 5065
Culver City, CA 90231-5056
Phone 310-649-0372
E-mail: IKOROBOOK@worldnet.att.net
John Lovell, Jr., Black Song, the Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out, New York: Macmillan, 1972, pp. 402-422
Bernice Johnson Reagon, “Spirituals: An African American Communal Voice,” in If You Don’t Go, Don’t Hinder Me: The African American Sacred Song Tradition, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2001, pp. 68-99.
Jon Michael Spencer, As the Black School Sings: Black Music Collections at Black Universities and Colleges , NY: Greenwood Press, 1987.
Afrocentric Voices in Classical Music
R. Nathaniel Dett, ed. Religious Folk-Songs of The Negro as Sung at Hampton Institute, New York: AMS Press, 1972.
Vivian Flagg McBrier, R. Nathaniel Dett: His Life and Works, 1882-1943, Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1977.
Anne Key Simpson, Follow Me: The Life and Music of R. Nathaniel Dett, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993.
Jon Michael Spencer, ed., The R. Nathaniel Dett Reader: Essays on Black Sacred Music, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991.
John Lovell, Jr., Black Song, the Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out, New York, Macmillan, 1972, pp. 447-448.
Alice Tischler, Fifteen Black American Composers: A Bibliography of Their Works, Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1981.
Afrocentric Voices in Classical Music
Hall Johnson, "Notes on the Negro Spiritual," (1965). In Readings in Black American Music, comp. and ed. Eileen Southern, 2nd ed., New York: W.W. Norton, 1972.
John Lovell, Jr., Black Song, the Forge and the Flame: The Story of How the Afro-American Spiritual Was Hammered Out, New York, Macmillan, 1972, pp. 448-449.